onlooker wrote:umm, I do not really agree. First, money has been spent to build national road system and to produce and import all those cars China now has. All these resources could have been used instead to fund the national railway system. Second, I did a little research and in turns out that by looking at cars per capita China in only second to US in terms of cars on road. So they are already there in terms of a significant car culture with the concomitant need for oil. I provide this link to check on cars per capita of different countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... per_capita

According to the link provided, you are missing the point that the population of China is roughly five times that of the US.

Building the roads first enabled the economy to grow much faster than it otherwise would have, building the railways would have worked 150 years ago when there was no motorized road transport available.

Ronald Coase, Nobel Economic Sciences, said in 1991 “If we torture the data long enough, it will confess.”

Yes the population of China is much larger but that in fact is the point when you see per capita it infers per individual so since China has much more people their actual total number of cars is huge second only to US. Second, in terms of transport China could have transported many goods via train so why would that not have enabled them to grow economically. Now, the last point China created from scratch the highway system it was not their before so why could they have not forgone any highway building or car ownership in favor of railway. This could have happened as soon as their economy really began to grow sometime in the 70's or 80's.

“"If you think the economy is more important than the environment, try holding your breath while counting your money"”

umm, interesting and now they seem to be really committed to much more railway. I have heard that the traffic jams are so huge now and that some Chinese are even reconsidering buying cars. So this may be the impetus for this new binge of railway building. Still, I wonder if the Chinese are not apprised of peak oil so why invest so heavily in cars particularly of the combustion engine type? Just wondering.

“"If you think the economy is more important than the environment, try holding your breath while counting your money"”

onlooker wrote:umm, interesting and now they seem to be really committed to much more railway. I have heard that the traffic jams are so huge now and that some Chinese are even reconsidering buying cars. So this may be the impetus for this new binge of railway building. Still, I wonder if the Chinese are not apprised of peak oil so why invest so heavily in cars particularly of the combustion engine type? Just wondering.

China is heavily invested in building a Methanol fuel economy as well. Every car built in China has to be M-100/E-100 compliant and they are building the system to manufacture Methanol from coal or natural gas.

II Chronicles 7:14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

Produce and grow, Produce and grow, Produce and grow, Produce and grow etc to infinity (or more like extinction !!)

Their like a giant ants nest, 6000 miles across. Absolutely no stopping them.

They are to start a High speed line down to Thailand very soon - plastic shit southbound, rice northbound. Also one being planned across Brazil to Peru (or Chile) - whats that for ? Coffee, Brazil Nuts, Iron Ore, Coal, Oil.

The buggers are everywhere, the planets resource vacuum cleaner on max and growing.

Great eye opening post G. Yeah it resembles some kind of locust swarm, no stopping it until all the crops are gone. Is that not the revelation we all are receiving. Keep going until we cannot. Then what?

“"If you think the economy is more important than the environment, try holding your breath while counting your money"”

Tanada wrote:A couple of news reports have recently come out crowing about how China's economy just isn't growing much right now. Well I went and looked up China's car sales for the last several years and this is what I found, yes growth is a little slower than it was in the white hot days of the last decade. However the growth rate is still orange hot compared to the Western old line industrial powers.

2015 numbers are for just the first quarter of the year but I challenge anyone to say with a straight face China is no longer interested in expanding their passenger vehicle fleet and competing for world oil supply. The facts are at their average monthly sale rate in the first quarter of 2015 they will have already purchased more passenger cars by April 30 2015 than they bought in the entire calendar year of 2008.

Last bit of info, the car sales last year took a big hit in the third quarter, but surged in the fourth quarter to reach all new heights. Click on link below to see the graph, I couldn't get the image function to work correctly.

I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

One wonders how much longer given that all this Chinese expansion as we have discovered has also relied on accessible cheap credit. When the credit faucet slows or stops what then. They seem to have tried to and I paraphrase duplicate"the greatest mis-allocation of resources in the history of humanity" referring to the suburban sprawl of the US. It makes absolutely no sense given where the planet is, given their huge population, given peak oil. But that is the insanity that is gripping the world or in this case China.

“"If you think the economy is more important than the environment, try holding your breath while counting your money"”

Like I said in another post. The Chinese capitalists must have concluded it would be less expensive to lure the rural folks to sweatshop jobs in the postcard-pretty New Cities rather than bring modern life to them.

I still contend that the so called ghost cities might be the smartest thing ever done by China. It all depends on what the next decade of climate change brings. They could move most of their coastal population to those upland ghost cities within a few months of deciding to do so. With a totalitarian government they could seize all property within three meters of current sea level and condemn the structures, then scrap them out and relocate the population. I don't want to live in a totalitarian country, but that form of government does have advantages when it comes time to act.

I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

I still have to wonder why China did not go all into mass transit and instead seem to have it as a supplement to an already vast car culture? Whomever can give me a reasonable explanation I will salute haha.

“"If you think the economy is more important than the environment, try holding your breath while counting your money"”

I all ready did onlooker. The capitalists don't want the labors to leave the sweatshops. The sweatshops are located where they need to be, by river/ocean transport hubs for sales to the USA. The capitalists don't want the consumer take their new money back to their home village.

onlooker wrote:I still have to wonder why China did not go all into mass transit and instead seem to have it as a supplement to an already vast car culture? Whomever can give me a reasonable explanation I will salute haha.

China has plenty of mass transit. The country is too overpopulated and despite communism there's a desire among the people to attain symbols of wealth and success, like personal automobiles.

"If the oil price crosses above the Etp maximum oil price curve within the next month, I will leave the forum." --SumYunGai (9/21/2016)

onlooker wrote:I still have to wonder why China did not go all into mass transit and instead seem to have it as a supplement to an already vast car culture? Whomever can give me a reasonable explanation I will salute haha.

China has plenty of mass transit. The country is too overpopulated and despite communism there's a desire among the people to attain symbols of wealth and success, like personal automobiles.

This is best reason Onlooker. But, this does beg another question. Why did the Chinese not socially engineer alternative symbols of wealth and success and status that were not so energy intensive? I suspect the reason is that as capitalists they are just copy cats. Perhaps scaled down just a bit but copy cats none the less.

Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Apeblog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/website: http://www.mounttotumas.com